Tube systems have been employed or unitized in a wide variety of different applications. A few non-limiting examples of such applications include chemical industries/plants, power stations, semiconductor fabrication industries, food and beverage industries, and many more. In most of these applications, the tubes are susceptible to developing a variety of faults, depending on their operating conditions. Some of the common faults may include leaking connectors, stuck valves, accumulation of deposits, bulges, corrosion etc. Many techniques have been developed in an effort to monitor or inspect the current conditions of such tube systems. Some of these inspection techniques must be performed in an “off-line” setting. Thus, to perform the inspection, the application employing the tube system is required to be shutdown or stopping the processes taking place in these tube systems. Employing such techniques can be quite costly and disruptive. Other inspection techniques can be performed in an on-line or operational system without interrupting the processes in the tube systems. Examples of such on-line techniques can include “sniffers” that operate to detect leaking substances, or acoustic emission techniques which examine the noise emitted by the tube systems. Such currently available on-line techniques are deficient in that they provide limited accuracy.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a solution for inspecting tube systems that can continuously monitor the tube systems while in operation (on-line), at any time, and that provide a high degree of accuracy with regards to identifying faults, determining the location of such faults and identifying the type of fault.